


The reason Avatar is a perfect kid’s show while Teen Titans Go and Thundercats Roar fail their audience

by HandmaidenOfHorror



Series: Nonfiction and Metafiction Archive [8]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Teen Titans Go!, Thundercats Roar
Genre: Critique, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24288376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandmaidenOfHorror/pseuds/HandmaidenOfHorror
Summary: The reason for me writing this piece of meta has to do with She-Ra finale, unusually satisfying despite leaving behind many plot holes and loose ends. Therefore, it will contain spoilers for the series, as well as Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron Legendary Defender, Teen Titans Go and Thundercats Roar. I’ll say from the beginning that I dislike the latter two series, so if you are a fan, please come bearing it in mind.
Series: Nonfiction and Metafiction Archive [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1532405
Kudos: 9





	The reason Avatar is a perfect kid’s show while Teen Titans Go and Thundercats Roar fail their audience

In the era of Enlightenment, an idea arose that a fiction should follow three principles:

  * Docere – being educational
  * Movere – being emotionally moving
  * Delectare – being delightful



Of course, saying what fiction should be is laughable and really shouldn’t be implemented. That’s about fiction in general. When your intended audience is 7 and under it’s a different story.

Adults and to a large part teenagers are already developed as people, and when they interact with fiction they are (or at least should be) able to differentiate it from reality, see when fictional characters’ behavior is exaggerated for comic purposes etc. Small children, on the other hand, are still developing psychologically and are absorbing messages both from family and environment and the media.

With this in mind, a creator of children’s media has responsibility larger than somebody writing for adults or teenagers. I am not talking about moral lessons, children hate that, but stories that will enrich the child’s worldview, or at least their imagination. That’s why I think that kid’s media follow the old principles at least to some degree. I wanted to redefine them for the time period and intended audience, which can be seen below, with examples of how to taken from the original Avatar cartoon.

  * Docere – the story should enrich the child’s understanding of the world. It doesn’t have to be a documentary-like story: in Avatar, the cultures, ideologies and characters themselves are inspired by real life Asian and Native cultures instead of European culture. By doing this, the authors put the Other in the center of the story – the Other is the hero, and there are no Us in the story at all. Avatar may be the place where a Western child learns of non-Christian spirituality for the first time, and where an Eastern child may first realize their nation may be responsible for genocidal atrocities.
  * Movere – for the story to be moving, it needs to have characters who have goals, and values dear to the characters will be lost if the goals are not obtained – in other words, the story needs stakes. The stakes don’t have to be high like in Avatar, where the heroes need to stop the Fire Nation’s war machine before it destroys their world, but think at think age children wouldn’t have patience for low stakes slice of life stories. I may be mistaken. Also in this point, it should be mentioned that the story shouldn’t glorify bad example that are within the child’s scope of possibility to mimic – like _farting in people’s faces_.
  * Delectare – the story should be pleasant in consumption: the animation should be fluid and colorful, the more detailed the better. There should be music accompanying the animation, preferably more complex than the simple songs the child may hear on the radio. The language should be slightly above the child’s reading level, encouraging them to explore the possibilities of the language and learn new terms to enrich their vocabulary. Again, Avatar is among the best animated Western shows (even though it was actually animated in Korea and Japan) and has very memorable music inspired by non-Western traditional music cultures. The language may be not that refined, but again, the cartoon teaches the child audiences of terms related to non-Western cultures and spirituality.



Of course, a good children’s media doesn’t have to follow each example:

  * Steven Universe has simplistic animation style that is often off-model and rather simple music, but this series teaches children not only about existence of queer people and dealing with complex emotions, but also various science fiction ideas. And while most of the episodes are slice of life fillers, when the plot kicks in it’s very moving. This is alongside Avatar a series that leaves you thinking regardless of your age.
  * She-Ra doesn’t even bother to teach the viewers anything (other the existence of queer people and heroes from various ethnic backgrounds), but it has great animation and music, witty dialogue and very dramatic series-long plotlines that keep the young viewer on the edge. The case of The Dragon Prince is the same, so was Voltron Legendary Defender before the final season put it in a firmly “not for children” basket.
  * Most Disney media don’t have anything new to teach the kids and utterly simplify anything possibly too foreign or too complex, but they have great audiovisuals and storylines moving to a very young viewer (not so much for an adult one…)



And then we have stories that not only don’t bother with any of the categories, but go against them. Teen Titans Go and Thundercats Roar both have very bad, lazy animation that is honestly unpleasant to look at, and the musical score is just as atrocious. It wouldn’t make them that bad, OKKO was awful to look at too and it turned out pretty decent with a few moments of greatness, but these series seem to intentionally teach children behaviors contrary to how a child is taught to behave.

The idiotic characters of both shows are rude, egoistic and self-centered to the point of psychopathy, never learn anything or grow as characters, never think of consequences of their actions and almost never face obstacles of any height – and when they do, they refuse to overcome them and the plot is resolved some other way.

This would be an alright premise for an adult oriented parody show, but as the creators admit, their shows are aimed at babies and toddlers, kids too young to have the tools to analyze their media, too young to even properly tell fiction from reality. As I said before, I believe there’s an additional responsibility when creating media for very your viewers or listeners. By going exactly against those responsibilities the creators of the two shows discussed above act like their characters – but real world has consequences, and the weight of the consequences will be on toddlers who watch the shows.

(On more personal level, I despise TTG and TCR because they are inferior parodies of two lines I loved, 2011 Thundercats and DC Animated Movie Universe, that got cancelled while those two remain. But I wouldn’t be writing this essay if it was my sole problem.)


End file.
